by Mailie Meloy
Benjamin made soup over a tiny chemical fire that gave off no smoke and wouldn’t give away their position. He had taken over the business of cooking. His father, who could work such wonders, ought to be a better chef, but he saw cooking as a task of refueling, delivering calories to the body.
There were mats in the hut to sleep on, and Benjamin stretched out on one. The moment he put his head on the rolled-up jacket that was his pillow, he had a vivid memory of Janie holding back her hair over a little pot, in her parents’ London kitchen, boiling leaves that the gardener in the Physic Garden had given them. The smell of the steam compelled a person to tell the truth, and made Benjamin and Janie tell each other things they didn’t want to say.
He sat up on the mat, in the abandoned hut. Janie had the glassine envelope. He was sure of it. He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock at night on a Sunday, which meant it was late morning for her. A good time to try.
The idea behind the powder, which he wasn’t sure he had perfected, was that a thing split in half is still connected to its other half. It was meant to establish a means of communication over great distance. He had been thinking about the story of Zeus splitting human beings in half, out of fear that they would become too powerful. In the story, the halved people felt incomplete, and always yearned for their missing counterparts. Benjamin believed that the divided particles in his powder would behave the same way, and provide a link between the users. He dug in his knapsack, tapped a few grains into his canteen, and drank it down. Now he needed to concentrate. He closed his eyes and deliberately called up memories:
Janie ringing Sergei Shiskin’s doorbell, making up a story about the science team needing the Russian boy’s help. The brave, solemn look on her face as she took off her grandmother’s gold earrings to melt them down for the invisibility solution. Janie on the deck of the icebreaker, cap pulled over her ears, hair blowing wildly. The way he had known that he could kiss her then—that she would let him and it would be all right.
And then he was in a place he had never seen, a small room with flowered curtains and a low bookshelf. He was sitting on a sagging couch. There was a thin paperback atlas open on his lap, and a hand—not his hand, but a girl’s hand—turning the pages. Janie. It worked! She was looking at a map of Australia, and there were the New Hebrides. Did she know he had been there, from his letters? He wondered if he could move her hand. Could he point, if he concentrated hard enough?
He thought about her right index finger and willed it toward the speck of island on the map. But instead she turned the page. Now she was looking at South America. That didn’t do him any good, but still he concentrated on her hands, trying to move them. He tried to stretch out the fingers on her right hand, but nothing happened. He made a fist with his own hand, and thought her fingers curled slightly, but maybe she was doing that anyway.
She turned the page again. He saw the South China Sea, and felt his heart start to race. She was very, very warm. He decided that her dominant right hand might be too strongly connected to her own logical left brain, so he concentrated all his attention on her resting left hand. Her fingers unfolded.
He thought harder and moved his own left hand as he wanted her to move hers. He focused hard on his index finger—on her index finger, the one they were pointing together. It came down on the long curving shape of Vietnam, and Benjamin nearly collapsed with the effort. He was sweating. He held the finger there on her map, both with his body and with his mind. As long as he didn’t have to move it again, he thought he could keep it in place.
But then the atlas was thrown aside on the couch, and both of Janie’s hands were moving outside his control. They caught up a small red notebook and a pen from the coffee table and flipped to a blank page. The right hand wrote in a hurried scrawl:
Benjamin! Are you in Vietnam? Point to answer:
YES NO
With renewed effort and excitement, he shifted her left index finger toward YES.
Then he heard Janie’s voice, as if from inside his own head. It was the strangest effect. “Can you hear me?” she asked.
He lifted her index finger a fraction of an inch and let it fall back on YES.
“Oh!” the voice in his head cried in amazement. “But I can’t hear you, right?”
“I don’t think so,” he said aloud, but she went on talking:
“Because you’re looking in here this time,” she said, “and I can’t see where you are. So it goes one direction at a time. Right? I have so many things to tell you. To ask you. I took the powder twice and the second time it made me really sick and didn’t work. So I think we have to wait a day between doses. Does that sound right?” She rested her left hand lightly on the notebook.
He lifted her finger and let it fall back on YES. It was getting easier to move it, now that she was willing.
“Okay,” she said. “This stuff wore off quickly before, so I’ll try to be fast. I saw you and your father in the jungle, in a war. Are you in a war?”
His finger—and therefore hers—moved toward NO. But then he slid it back to YES. People were shooting each other and dying. If that wasn’t a war, he didn’t know what was.
“Will you please be careful?” she asked.
He left her finger on YES, but without any real conviction. He could be as careful as he wanted, but survival out here was mostly dumb luck.
“I feel you fading already,” Janie’s voice said. “Listen, I recreated Jin Lo’s desalinization process for seawater, but someone stole it from me. His name is Magnus Magnusson, and he got me kicked out of school. He’s a terrible—”
A door opened in the room where Janie was, and she abruptly stopped talking. A boy about their age walked in, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Dark curls spilled over his forehead, and his eyes lit up when he saw Janie. A bright smile flashed across his face, and Benjamin could see that the boy was smitten. “I got the part,” he said shyly.
“Which one?” Janie asked.
“Demetrius.”
“I knew it!” Janie cried, and she leaped off the couch, dragging Benjamin with her. His vision distorted with the sudden motion. She threw her arms round the boy’s tall, lean frame. They were Benjamin’s arms, too, and she was hugging the boy a bit carelessly, he thought. He wanted to draw back, but couldn’t. She let go and caught the boy by the shoulders.
“I’m so proud of you,” she said.
The boy was grinning at her like a fool. The connection was starting to fade. The living room had grown lighter and less defined, like an overexposed photograph. “Were you talking to someone when I came in?” the boy asked.
“No! Who? Can you wait a second?”
She let go of the boy and ran into a small bathroom. The blurring caused by her quick movement made Benjamin dizzy. She turned on the water in the sink and looked in the mirror over it. The image danced and then held still, and Benjamin drew in his breath sharply. It was the first time he’d seen Janie’s face in two years. She was flushed with pleasure from congratulating the boy. There were high pink spots on her cheeks, and her hair fell in loose waves.
“Benjamin, you still there?” she whispered. “Listen, quickly. I want to explain. I’m living with this family because I got kicked out of school. They have an Italian restaurant in town, in Grayson. That’s the son.”
Benjamin tried to focus, through his nausea, to keep the picture clear. Her face had lost some of its childish softness. She had cheekbones. She pushed her hair impatiently behind her ears, and the look in her eyes was determined but also afraid. Benjamin wished she would explain everything, but she was disappearing fast, and her voice sounded like it was coming over a great distance.
“We have to talk again,” she said. “Should we try at midnight tomorrow night? I’ll be finished with work then.”
That was morning for him. He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. But she seemed to nod slightly, too. Then the image faded, and she was gone.
Benjamin opened his eyes. He was sitting in
the dark, abandoned hut, with the smell of charred thatch in the air, and his father breathing evenly on the mat on the other side of the room. Benjamin turned to look at his father, and the room whirled. His stomach heaved. He hadn’t felt this bad since he drank too much rice wine at a village wedding.
Carefully, moving slowly to protect his spinning head, he lay back down on his mat. He knew that time had passed, of course. He had seen so many things that kids weren’t supposed to see that sometimes he felt like he was a hundred years old. But in his mind, Janie was still fourteen, laughing at Count Vili’s stories on the deck of the icebreaker and licking herring grease off her fingers. Or pleading with Benjamin to stay, as the train couplings corroded between them.
She had spent two years without him, two years growing up and having her own life. He knew that, in his mind. But he hadn’t really understood it until he saw her. She could never have been a spy, broadcasting every thought the way she did. Everything she felt had always played visibly over her face. She was so happy for that kid Demetrius, or whatever his name was. Benjamin had been saving lives in the jungle, and this guy was going to be in a school play. And Janie was proud of him, and had hugged him. For a part in a play!
Benjamin rolled over on the mat. His head was clearing now. I’m so proud of you, Janie had said to the grinning boy. And she had hugged him. There’d been something strange and unexpected in the hug, but Benjamin wasn’t sure what it was. Then he realized with a shock: Janie had real breasts now, and they must have pressed against the boy as she threw her arms round him. That Benjamin had been forced to experience the hug in his own body seemed particularly unfair and revolting. He pulled a mosquito net over his head and tried counting to a hundred—then a thousand—to get to sleep.
CHAPTER 15
The Mickey Finn
Janie was elbow-deep in dishwater, scrubbing at a particularly stubborn bit of brown, baked-on cheese from a lasagna tray, still high from having made contact with Benjamin, when Raffaello came into the kitchen with a stack of plates.
“Your rich friend’s here,” he said.
Janie looked up, her face hot from the steam. “Who?”
“That pretty girl you used to have dinner with. With the ugly glasses.”
“Opal?”
“With her parents.”
Janie’s heart seemed to trip through three or four extra beats. The Magnussons were bound to come in sometime, of course, for a Sunday night dinner, but she’d gotten caught up in thoughts of Benjamin and burnt cheese and the East High school play, and she wasn’t prepared.
“That guy’s a jackass,” Raffaello said, pulling a bottle of wine from a rack. “Always pretending to be everyone’s friend, but really ordering us around.”
Janie barely heard him. Her thoughts were racing ahead of her. She might not get this chance again. “Did he order wine?” she asked.
“A glass. His wife’s not having any.”
“I’ll pour it.”
Raffaello grinned at her. “You gonna poison him because he’s a jackass?”
Janie kept her voice light. “That’s not a good reason?”
“Funny,” he said. “Anyway, we have to pour the wine at the table.”
Janie took off her rubber gloves. “Let me just make sure he has a clean glass. He’s always complaining about things not being spotless.” She found a clean linen towel and wiped the edges of a wineglass with her back turned. The pastry chef was teasing Raffaello in Italian, saying something about the great, famous actor—she could understand that much, by now—and Raffaello parried back with something she didn’t follow. She slipped the glassine envelope from her pocket and tapped a few grains of powder into the bottom of the glass.
“What’s taking so long?” Raffaello asked.
“There was a water spot,” she said, palming the envelope. “Now it’s perfect.” She handed him the glass, glancing to see if the grains were visible. They were, but only if you were looking for them. Otherwise no one would notice. At least she hoped no one would notice. And the grains would dissolve as soon as the wine was poured.
Raffaello rolled his eyes. “He doesn’t deserve such perfection,” he said.
“Go pour,” she said. “Keep the glass upright, though. He hates it when waiters swing them by the stems.”
Raffaello made a skeptical face.
“He does!” she said. “He thinks it looks careless.”
“I’ll show him careless,” Raffaello said, but he carried the glass upright into the restaurant, grabbing the bottle of wine by the neck as he left.
Janie felt a little faint. What if Mr. Magnusson noticed? He’d just think they were bits of breadcrumb, and toss them out. He wouldn’t know what it was. He didn’t even know she was here. She was still safe. It was all going to be fine.
But what if he drank the powder, and it turned out that he could see into her world? The thought gave her a moment of panic.
But Mr. Magnusson wouldn’t know how to do it, of course. She’d had to deliberately concentrate on Benjamin, to see his world. And Benjamin had only seen hers because he’d known how to do it even better than she did. Mr. Magnusson knew nothing. She wouldn’t let him know she was watching. She wouldn’t tip him off by trying to push his hands around. She would wait until tomorrow morning, when he would be in his office. It should be safe to try it by then, and she might learn something there.
“Where are my plates?” a waiter asked, seeing the empty rack. “Dai, dai, dai, ragazza! Madonna!”
Janie shook away her thoughts and hurried the clean plates to the rack. Then she pulled on rubber gloves and plunged her arms back into the dirty water. She had just run another load through the machine when Giovanna came in.
“Your pretty friend is here,” Giovanna said.
“So I hear,” Janie said.
“You wan’ go say hello?”
“No, that’s okay.”
Giovanna frowned and put a hand on her hip. “You embarrassed, working here?”
“Of course not!”
“You not friends anymore?”
“Not really.”
“Ah,” Giovanna said, nodding sagely. “It is over a boy?”
“No!”
“This is a thing that happens.”
“It isn’t like that.”
Giovanna shrugged. “Okay. You don’ have to tell me.”
“There isn’t anything to tell.”
“Just talk to her. I tell you, this is the best thing, to face this trouble with your friend. I know.”
“Really,” Janie said, “I don’t want to. And I have dishes to do.”
Giovanna shook her head. “When you’re older, you learn,” she said sadly. “There is no point to lose friendship over a boy. Boys, they come and go.”
“Thanks, Giovanna,” Janie said, lifting a heavy pot into the sink and turning on the water.
Giovanna was lost in memories. “I learn this the hard way,” she said.
CHAPTER 16
The Cat
On Jin Lo’s first day in her childhood house in China, in her haunted city, she sat cross-legged on the dusty floor with closed eyes, mentally paging through the Pharmacopoeia, recalling the pages she had memorized while working with the apothecary and his son. She was looking for a potion to summon ghosts, but she had found nothing.
On the second day, the striped cat she had seen in the street came to her, and she held it in her arms, stroking its soft fur. It was a tomcat with black and white stripes, and she named it Shun Liu, after her little brother: the willow tree that bends but does not break. In the afternoon, Shun Liu brought her a dead mouse, just as her old drooling black cat with the white nose used to do. The cat was concerned about her. It wanted her to eat.
She expected someone from the Party to come and turn her out of the house, tell her she had no right to be there, demand to see her papers. But no one came. She started a fire in the hearth and began to work. She still had a small vial of the Quintessence, from the tree t
he apothecary had forced to bloom three years ahead of schedule, back in London. That seemed long ago, longer ago than her childhood, which was vivid to her as she moved about her old house, talking to her family.
She tried to stay firmly rooted in time. This was the year of the Horse. They had forced the bloom in the year of the Dragon, when the tree was planning—if trees planned—to bloom in the year of the Sheep. Those flowers should have been sheep, white and fluffy and sweetly unnoticed. Instead they became dragons, doing combat with a fiery atomic ball of light.
The master to whom she had been apprenticed had never given much credence to astrology. He said it was a superstition for grandmothers. But he had been a Tiger, without question: fierce and powerful. And Jin Lo, born in the year of the Snake, had become silent and dangerous, quick and cold-blooded.
But here was a question: Would she have become so snakelike if she had stayed with her family—if she had kept her heart? She might have married the dutiful boy who lived up the street and wanted to become a doctor. She might have a fat, sweet baby of her own by now. But perhaps coldness had been her destiny. Perhaps it was in the stars.
She cooked a yellow resin from the tree that grew in the front yard until it turned to black ash. She steeped a bit of persistent ivy she’d found growing up through the floorboards for a bitter-smelling tea. She made herself a makeshift mortar and pestle from two stones, and she ground the brown thistle heads of weeds from the yard into a dry, beige powder.
The cat licked the corked top of her vial of Quintessence and mewed.
“Shh,” Jin Lo said. “I’m working.”
The cat rubbed its head against her leg.
“Stop!” Jin Lo said. “I need to concentrate.”
She was no longer a child, but here she was still playing at “eluding the cat.” She smiled. It was the kind of joke her father would have made. “Are you there, Baba?” she asked the air. “Are you putting your jokes in my head?”
